The Tenants of Moonbloom

by Edward Lewis Wallant

  “Ohhh-hh,” he gasped fearfully.

  “Ahhh-hh,” she responded cheerfully.

  “I didn’t mean . . .”

  Sheryl, lovely in the blue-white television light, chucked him under the chin and said, “Let’s sit on the couch, hon.” She took his hand and led him there, grinning at his stiff, aching walk.

  They sat down, and she leaned away from him, studying his face with amusement. The dragon seemed to wink in the wavering light, and Norman addressed his apology to it. “I hope you don’t think . . . that is, I don’t know what happened to me, I mean, I know, but I don’t know why. No, of course, I know why, but I really wasn’t thinking of . . . I haven’t danced in years, and it just, the blood seemed to rush into . . . What I mean is, sometimes when a man gets close to a . . . girl, there’s a nervous response that forces the blood into his . . .”

  “Why, honey, all that happened was you got a hard on.”

  Norman smiled feebly, hearing the crackle of fire consuming him. From his stomach to his knees a cooking process rolled his organs around, and the steam reddened his face. “Sheryl,” he said weakly.

  Sheryl came close, her face blurring. He felt her lips fasten hotly on his. With a moan he tried to climb her, his hands clutching air. “Easy, easy, hon,” she said with soft laughter. “Here, there, ahh, yeah, sweety, yeah . . .”

  His gratitude knew no bounds when her warm, naked breasts fell into his hands. “I love you, I love you,” he groaned. He was tossed like a chip by the sensation of skin against skin. “Sheryl, Sheryl, Sheryl,” he cried through his teeth. “I love . . .”

  “The toilet,” she whispered from below, holding him up in the air like a child. He nodded wildly. “And a rent cut?” He tossed his head, trying to shake it loose from his body, and her demands did nothing to reduce his feelings. Distended, breaking, he agreed to carte blanche. For a long moment he observed and passed through many things. Sheryl’s face expressed profound affection and bliss; he knew an instant’s mortification as he noticed the band leader’s face sweetly smiling at them; he worried about her father, whose snoring began to caricature itself; and, finally, he felt himself on an eminence he had never achieved before and he looked out with wonder upon the vast valley of the world, dizzied by the height, astounded by the immensity of the view. Sheryl raised him higher, her arms extended full length, her face full of savage and delighted mischief. And then she plunged him down, hara-kari fashion, immolating herself with a great sigh. There was a splat of impact, Norman rolled his eyes back into his head, held on to unimaginable pleasure for a short while, rearing and bucking to the tune of the string section playing “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,” and then exploded frighteningly.

  He never noticed when Sheryl removed his body from her but only lay for some time muttering into the dusty cushions, “I love, love, love. . ..” Strengthless, his skin charged with sensitivity, he felt the warm flickers of the television light over his buttocks. The bathroom sounded busy with water and movement. He heard footsteps on the ceiling. Something profound had changed in him, and he sought to recognize it. Like a dusty bug, the image of a small man in a large hat walked across his brain, and he felt deep pity for the figure. He felt no peace, though, but, rather, a great shapeless ambition that saddened him. For a while he lay there, wondering what he really could do with the impossible situation. Something began to occur to him, and he cupped it, patiently gave it time to mature.

  But there was no more snoring! He sat up quickly and drew his pants on, stepped into his shoes barefooted, and slipped on his shirt. When he was all dressed, he shoved his underpants into one pocket, his socks into another.

  “Okay?” Sheryl asked, coming back into the room.

  “I can’t begin . . .”

  “Gimme a kiss and then go home, huh?” she said, sleepily. “I’m just bushed.”

  He kissed her tenderly and wasn’t in the least disillusioned when she said at the door, “Now don’t forget what you promised.”

  “I’ll never forget,” Norman said with a strange lilting note in his voice.

  And then he went out, heading for his office with the wind cold on his sockless ankles, feeling reckless with its tricky insinuation up his trouser legs to his loins free of underwear. And the thing that had occurred to him as he lay exhausted on Sheryl’s couch, now, in the clear dark, formed unmistakably. He would do all the work himself, he decided, his face seeming to sparkle, as at the idea of a holy war. But, what was more important, he would do it with laughter for it occurred to him that joy resembled mourning and was, if anything, just as powerful and profound.

  He was not upset, or surprised either, to recognize the presence of pain in him as the tenants filed through his mind, stepping brutally on the tender places in his heart. He thought of the dead child, the trampled dignity of Basellecci, the constant hell of the Lublins, the erupting of Del Rio, the desperate defiance of Karloff, and all the rest of them in their agonies; and where he had the choice of crying, he chose irrevocably its opposite. He laughed loudly in a tone Norman Moonbloom would never have dared. And then, for the first time in his life, he sang aloud without shame.

  A sophisticated policeman just studied him wearily as he sang out of tune, “Bei mir bist du schoen, again I’ll explain . . .”

  17

  IN HIS APARTMENT he took sensual pleasure in writing a new itemized list, setting down words of things he could anticipate using, things he himself could touch and smell. His own expert, he estimated grandly, and knew the delight of his own generosity for the very first time.

  “Paint,” he wrote, “fifty gallons—white, ten gallons—various colors. Brushes—two of each size. Turpentine—ten gallons. Linseed oil—twelve gallons. Plaster—two hundred pounds . . .”

  And couldn’t he just smell the sharp tang of the new paint, the wet, cereal-like odor of the plaster? The sound of the city was a great, cavelike murmuring, filled with the wing beats of motors, the little, distant bleats of horns and cries. The pain settled down in his body and made itself at home. He wondered how they sold wire.

  His refrigerator made a steady, glassy vibration; the streets outside took long asthmatic breaths, never exhaling. He wrote: “Trowels or plastering knives or whatever they call them. Stuff for the tiles. Pipe (ask Bodien). Other tools (check with Gaylord).”

  The wind shook his windows, from another apartment he heard a Christmas carol on the radio. He was, at that moment, teetering on the unreal, and when he was unbalanced he didn’t really know which way he fell. He hardly noticed the sound of someone coming up the steps, but knocked over his chair at the crashing of a hand against his door.

  “Who?” he cried. He swallowed. “Who is it?”

  “Moonbloom, Moonbloom,” a voice wailed. “You gotta . . .”

  Norman went to the door, trying to balance on the thin sense of joy; he was frightened, though, and wondered about the talent for laughing under threat of death.

  “Who is it?” he demanded, opening the door a crack, with the chain still on. The reek of alcohol made him grimace, and dimly he made out a mad face that was somewhat familiar. “Del Rio?”

  “Please, come on, Moonbloom, help me,” Del Rio said in a harsh undertone that made him sound gutted.

  Norman let him in. Del Rio walked into the light blinking, contorting his mouth. Norman gasped at his filth; there were his features, his Greek athlete’s body, but his jacket sleeve was ripped at the shoulder seam, and the jacket was crumpled, filthy. Worst of all were his padded, fighter’s eyes; they peered out from under the scarred folds with an expression Norman remembered seeing in the eyes of a rudely awakened sleepwalker. Del Rio was awake now, and it was unbearable to him to have his dream authenticated.

  “What happened to you? What are you doing here?” Norman sat, then stood quickly, unsure of Del Rio’s place.

  “Look, look,” Del Rio said, holding one hand out to Norman; unintentionally, his face expressed threat. “You know how I am, you know. What did I want? W
as it terrible? I wish for things . . . me, to be clean, clean. You saw how I kept myself, how I lived.”

  Norman sat down with some permanence now, staring open-mouthed at two parallel scratches on Del Rio’s neck. The black hair was wild as a burred mane and could have been carrying some frightful rubbish in its tangles. He sat in his formerly peaceful room and wondered anew at the presentations he was being offered with increasing frequency.

  “See, because I know about how they live in dirt, I know damn well.” Del Rio began walking back and forth, tossing his hands about, jerking his head awkwardly, as though all the fine mobility of his muscles had deserted him. “We lived six in a room, in a filthy, filthy room. My grandmother stank from disease. We saw my mother and father screwing, and when he was only nine and my sister was ten, my brother did it to my sister. And they smelled, on both sides of me they smelled. On a summer night, like he was my father’s shadow, there’d be Ramón going up and down on my sister while the old man was on my mother. And the old woman and me were the only ones without anything to do, and sometimes we’d look at each other in the dark, and I’d see her eyes gleaming. Like she was laughing. And voices and radios all around, in the other rooms, and the smell of garbage, and of them. I got to be thirteen and I start going to the gym, I start keeping myself cleaner than anyone who ever lived. I slept in the gym when I could. I took showers twice a day. It made me happy to live like that. I didn’t mind being out without a coat in the winter, and my body got strong and my mind got strong. When I had to sleep there, at home, I put myself like in a trance, rigid—I made myself go to sleep. After a while Ramón went away someplace, I never saw him any more. But my sister would still be there, and I’d lay stiff as a board, not looking at her, not hearing her. She used to whisper to me . . . I went in this trance. I improved my mind. You saw, I study acting, I trained, I kept myself . . .” And suddenly he was crying, his fists in his eyes. “You saw . . . them bastards with their roaches and their shit. How I cleaned that place, how I . . .”

  “What happened?” Norman asked, feeling a queer elation from his own aching body. Laughter swam beneath his great expanse of pity, blurred but visible, like a huge fish seen through ice. He was being treated to some awesome privilege, he felt, and he knew better than to answer it with despair.

  “I went out with this girl. We drank liquor. . . . I don’t know what happened. We got to my room. I got excited, crazy. I tore off her clothes. I don’t know what I was . . . She got all hot too. . .. It was all mixed up. She began to whisper to me. . .. And I’m a virgin. I don’t know, I don’t know. . .. I began to beat her up. I left her. Maybe she’s dead. I’m all, all . . .”

  Norman began to laugh with sad eyes, uncontrollably. Del Rio looked up at him, dazed, disbelieving, then believing, understanding that now there was no up or down any more. He sat with his head down, accepting Norman’s laughter, totally unable to feel indignation or hurt. Not so Norman, who felt an exquisite pain from his laughter. Standing over the seated fighter, he knew that much of his laughter came from a sensation of pure funniness—that he and Del Rio should have been deflowered on the same night was a thing of fabulous humor. True, what had prepared them for the ridiculously tardy initiation was as different as could be—the one being a lifetime of desperate and epic courage, the other, his own, a long sleep. But the tragic quality of Del Rio’s experience seemed only to lend a depth, a resonance to Norman’s laughter. Weeping and laughter both expressed the irresistible, and pain and joy interchanged between them. How had he chosen laughter? he wondered, shaking with it and dabbing at his eye with one knuckle while with the other hand he made a mute offering to the wrecked man, who couldn’t see his hand. He could only guess at some instinct for survival, or some hereditary tendency to pray in a dance of joy.

  When he stopped laughing, the wounds of his laughter began to bleed. Weakly he sat down beside Del Rio and put his hand on the muscular arm. “I wasn’t making fun, Del Rio. I can’t really explain; it would sound too silly to you. Of course this is all terrible. You’ve had an awful life—you won’t believe how much I feel it. What can I do for you? Shall we go to your room and see how the girl is? Come on, I’m sure you didn’t kill her, I’m sure you couldn’t have.”

  “You don’t know. I feel like . . . like hell. All the rotten things. Didn’t I try? What could I have done? Is a guy supposed to have a life like that? What kind of shit is all this? Tell me that, will you? Is it just a big shit pile, with everybody rotten and smelly? And me too, me too . . .” He looked at his big hands with loathing; it was too steep a descent for a man who had despised others as he had. Where was he without that carefully carved superiority? Bloodied, soiled, incubated in ugliness, he had imagined strength could deliver him. In his anguish he sighed with relief. “Now what? Tell me that. What am I supposed to do now?”

  “I don’t know what . . . what kind of . . . ‘shit’ this is, Del Rio,” Norman answered, staring hard at the pale, oil-colored skin. “It’s all new to me. I never was involved in things like this. I couldn’t describe to you how I lived. Look at how I look, can you see? I saw myself in a mirror today and I thought it was someone else. I bet I’m down to one fifteen. My body hurts me, I’m tired, almost sick it seems. And yet, yet I feel like I could do great things now. What? I don’t know. It’s all so foolish, the way I feel. A year ago, less than that even, I would have worried about the way I’m feeling, the way I want to . . . do something, the way I feel like laughing even though I get very sad and upset. Sometimes I tell myself that I’m heading for a breakdown, but mostly, these last few weeks, I have the sensation that life is just opening up for me. I’m considering hope, although I realize I might end up in a terrible state. Why did I laugh? Oh, just one thing in particular, a coincidence—there’s no sense going into it.” He allowed a minute for his raving to have some remote chance of getting to Del Rio. Then he tapped him vigorously on the arm. “Come on, let’s see where you stand. I feel like I can do things for you. Let’s go to your room. Then we’ll see.”

  Del Rio, who had never asked for help before, now looked upon it distastefully. “What can you do?” he said scornfully, stirring in the chair, still dangerous both to himself and to others. “I’m sorry I came here. You’re a nut, you know that? I ought to let you have it too. Now that I’m started, I ought to let everyone have it.” He stood up and made fists at his sides, breathing heavily through his mouth, his eyes glazed against the total darkness revealed to him.

  And looking at him, Norman grew frightened. Right then it was not so much physical injury he feared as the ghastly things that powered Del Rio. The tendons in Del Rio’s neck stood out, his eyes narrowed, he began to rock slightly. Norman became fascinated by the barely moving fists, which looked like great cured-leather clubs. He tried to prepare himself for the sensation of splintered bone and cartilage. Del Rio hunched himself, hissed slightly. Norman yearned for his murky plans. Del Rio stepped forward, and Norman closed his eyes.

  The moments became interminable. Within his head, Norman began to disengage his vague hopes. He heard the floor creak in front of him, heard the tremendous yet quiet voice of the city, with its feel of such gigantic weight that you lived in expectation of the earth’s giving way beneath it. He opened his eyes to see Del Rio weeping again, his hands harmless. Norman smiled.

  “Ah, you are hopeless,” he said with both mockery and tenderness. “Let’s go now. You’ll just have to leave it up to me.”

  Del Rio agreed by silence, and they went out together to ascertain his crime.

  •

  Norman came home very late and he was chuckling, filled with the strange and melancholy mirth that had first visited him early that evening. Now it was three o’clock in the morning. He fumbled secretively with the keys, unlocked the door, and tiptoed into the apartment like a drunk hiding his glee from a sleeping wife. For a few minutes he stood facing the glum light of the window, shaking his head with a queer smile. He remembered the sight of the enraged girl,
with her two black eyes, the policemen standing nervously in Del Rio’s room, tensed for violence and unbalanced by the fighter’s mute submission. And his own farewell to Del Rio before the police had taken him out to their car: “It was like pus from a wound, Del Rio—better out than in. I’ll save a room for you, and you’ll be surprised how clean the place will be.” And of course he had had to shout above the screaming of the furious girl, so that he couldn’t be sure that Del Rio had heard all of it. The policemen had seemed to consider taking Norman along when they heard what he said and saw how he said it. But then they had gone, and the house had become so quiet that he could hear Paxton’s typewriter from the floor above, and even dimly, from two floors up, Louie’s tiny television set playing some silly music that was distilled to a haunting quality by its distance. And he remembered thinking, “Look at me, see what I’m in. I never dreamed there was this.”

  Without turning the lights on, he walked into the bedroom and, in the dim light from the window, he studied the small skull of a man floating in the black water of the glass. This should have all happened to a bigger man, he thought, a monumental character. It will kill me. Then he smiled and made a creamy strip in the blackish-green image of the head. And the laughter trembled inside him, causing an increase in the pain, which in turn boiled the laughter more rapidly, which increased the pain, and so on.

  That child, he thought, laughing silently before the mirror, how terrible. And the Lublins and Basellecci and . . . His laughter was not because they were all funny; it was only slightly because of anything’s funniness. Rather, as he stood there, fantastically weary, it was an expression of profound modesty and wonder and shyness.